4/09/2014

Let's put the Tale o' the Kissing Congressman in context here: Chances are that this is a hit job on a politician that beat Eric Cantor's chosen candidate. And Vance McAllister, the representative who was caught on camera smashing his face against the face of a woman not his wife, was actually the saner of the two running (and remember: that's relative - it's like saying that Grown Ups is a better film than Grown Ups 2). McAllister thought that Louisiana should accept Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act because it would help people in poverty, which is especially high in the 5th District. He was declared to be the more "moderate" candidate, as opposed to Tea Party nutzoid Neil Riser. When McAllister won, no less an authority than Joe Scarborough declared that it was "pretty special stuff" to have a "pragmatic" Republican win.

McAllister's district is from dead central up to northeast Louisiana, with the towns of Alexandria and Monroe in there. It's around where Steel Magnolias was supposedly set. It's more or less an appendage of Mississippi culturally, economically, politically, racially, and just about every -ly you can think of. Oh, and the Duck Dynasty family is from up there, too.

Yeah, they made ads for McAllister. One of 'em even was McAllister's in-yer-black-face-Obama guest at the State of the Union. The Robertsons haven't issued any formal statement or nailed a dead duck to the congressman's office door, but one of the bearded bastards told McAllister that it was a private matter and should be handled that way. And that'd be all fine except, of course, McAllister had to go and bring God and faith and family into the special election he won just last November:

That's McAllister with his gray-haired wife and five precious angels around the breakfast counter, getting ready for Sunday churchin'.

You wanna make this extra sleazy? McAllister and the other woman's husband knew each other for years. They worked together in the oil fields. More fun? Both Heath Peacock and his wife contributed, separately, the maximum allowable by law, $5200, to McAllister's campaign. One of them got special access to the congressman. The other got his heart broken. Hardly seems fair. And the woman, Melissa Peacock, had a job at McAllister's local office, where they were filmed, and just resigned over the kiss.

To get back to the first point here, a pastor in Monroe said that one of McAllister's staff members leaked the security footage from the building. Preacher Danny Chance (seriously, the names in this thing are like something out of a Raymond Chandler book) remarked, "I just feel like there is a conspiracy to bring Vance down and destroy him. For someone on his staff to do that is wrong." Spurned staffer? Tea Party conspiracy? Someone took the footage and leaked it to the press. It ain't a stretch to think in such ways.

That press, by the way, is the bugfuck insane conservative publisher of the Ouachita Citizen newspaper, Sam Hanna, Jr. He's a got a brain full of teabags and writes like a Fox "news" spouting robot. Of the President, Hanna wrote that we can't "trust anything the Obama administration says or does. Think about it. Think about the IRS scandal. Benghazi. Fast and Furious. Russia. The 'red line' in Syria."

The Rude Pundit's no fan of McAllister's. More "moderate" though he may be, he still believes appalling things. He fucked up. He was nailing a friend's wife while he himself was married after telling everyone how much he loves himself some GodJesus. Certainly, what's good for Anthony Weiner oughta be good for McAllister. (Although, you know, it's Louisiana. You can fuck hookers while wearing a diaper and still get reelected.)

But this is about more than one weak man with a voice like a brain-damaged cow. It's an escalation of the GOP's internal war, where being 98% purely conservative ain't enough. This might be a grab-the-popcorn moment as the right tries to purge the party of its even slightly-less-doctrinaire members.